“I’M STILL A MAN… YOU THINK I CAN’T DO THIS?” THE WHEELCHAIR-BOUND DUKE WHISPERED TO HIS BRIDE
Chapter 11
The winter assembly arrived like a tide, filling Thornwick Hall with carriages, silk, wet cloaks, and the particular perfume of aristocratic judgment.
The Kensington trustees came first, followed by titled guests eager to see for themselves whether the broken duke could still command a household.
Lily moved through it with a composure that surprised even herself: directing servants, soothing an offended dowager, correcting a menu error before the trustees noticed it at all. She watched Charles observe her across the crowded drawing room, something unreadable and increasingly warm behind his careful expression.
Lady Adeline Randolph arrived among the guests.
Lily braced herself for jealousy, for coldness. She received neither.
“He expects everyone to leave,” Adeline told her gently over tea in a quiet corner of the drawing room. “When they do not, he finds some way to send them first. So that the leaving is his choice rather than theirs.”
“You loved him once.”
“I loved him once.” Adeline turned her cup. “I understand him still. Be patient with his fear, Duchess. It runs deeper than his legs.”
Augustus asked Lily to dance that evening, and refusing without a public scene proved impossible.
He held her at a careful, correct distance, and his voice pitched low enough that only she could hear.
“You are making a great many enquiries, Duchess. Letters to solicitors. Physicians brought in quietly under cover of night.” His hand was perfectly proper on her waist. His smile never wavered. “I would advise you to consider what your brother’s signature is worth in a court of law. One page. One altered entry. It would take very little to make Samuel Goodwin the author of the whole fraud rather than its witness.”
Lily’s feet kept moving. Her face kept its pleasant, social expression. But her blood had gone cold in her veins.
“Your grace is very pale,” Augustus said pleasantly. “Perhaps the room is warm.”
“Perhaps,” Lily said, “it is the company.”
He laughed, genuinely delighted, and released her into the crowd.
Charles was watching from across the room. He had seen the exchange; he could not have heard it. But when Lily crossed to him, he said, very quietly, “What did he say to you?”
Lily considered lying.
“Not here,” she said. “Not tonight.”
That night, unable to sleep, she rose and walked the corridors, and found herself drawn toward the music. Someone was playing — badly, slowly, an old piece she half remembered — from the abandoned ballroom in the western wing, the one sealed off years before she came.
She pushed the door open.
Charles sat in the dark with a single candle, at an old piano, his chair pulled up close. The rain had started again, hammering softly on the glass roof overhead.
“You should not be here,” he said without turning. “Neither should I.”
“It is your house.”
“It was my brother’s favourite room.” He pressed one key, let it die. “I have not opened it since the funeral.”
Lily crossed the floor and stood beside him, and neither of them spoke for a long moment.
Then he turned in his chair, and looked up at her, and the look in his eyes was one she had never seen there before — not guarded, not cold, not measuring. Just a man, alone in the dark, deciding to be brave about something other than pain.
He reached up and took her hand.